Weeklys Sports Analytics News Roundup – February 20th, 2018
Olympics: Fancy Stats’ 2018 Winter Olympics Power Rankings: Norway, Netherlands dominating. FiveThirtyEight analysis: The U.S. Is On Pace For A Lousy Olympics. Of course. as FiveThirtyEight also points out The U.S. Stunk At The Winter Olympics Until Extreme Sports Came Along. FiveThirtyEight finds The Dutch Own A Single Sport Like No Other Country In The Winter Olympics. FiveThirtyEight looks to answer What If Men And Women Skied Against Each Other In The Olympics?
Football: Football Perspective writing about the fact that points scored isn’t linearly correlated with winning percentage in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
Baseball: Ben Lindbergh article on The Sabermetric Movement’s Forgotten Foremother. RJ Anderson writes that Baseball believes in Jeff Mathis and the hidden value of game-calling by catchers. Tampa Bay Times on How Erik Neander ended up running the Rays. The Hardball Times on The Physics of the Rarified Air of Spring Training. Baseball Prospectus Feature: Pitch Tunneling with Michael Wacha. FanGraphs identifies Baseball’s Newest Pitcher-Friendly Park. Bobby Mueller analysis finds Minor league baseball MLB free agency puts the “R” in WAR. Thanks to the efforts of Retrosheet, Box Scores Back to 1908 & Play-by-Play Back to 1925 Added to Baseball Reference.
Basketball: Nylon Calculus piece: Diminishing returns on the step back jumper.
College Basketball: Toledo Blade: Toledo men’s basketball team embracing analytics.
Hockey: Fancy Stats says Stop using Corsi to assess NHL teams. There are better options available. MoneyPuck.com New feature announcement: Graphs for in-game Corsi %, xGoals %, etc for individual players and line combos.
Soccer: The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective asks Are Referees Biased Against Certain Teams In The English Premier League?
Lacrosse: Moneyball Lacrosse on the NLL Rookie of the Year award race.
Your moment of R: BaseballWithR takes a Historical Look at Hitting Rates. FC rStats, emulating FC Python’s methods, offers Introductory R learning resources using soccer ideas and concepts. Ben Dilday’s batted ball trajectory calculator in R. Bill Petti tutorial on How to Build a Statcast Database from BaseballSavant.
Check out these Pythons: FC Python continues with their great Python tutorials.
Conferences: The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference February 23rd and 24th in Boston. The Sloan research papers are up. The Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference 2018 is being held on March 2-4. March 9th through 11th is the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix.